Students reneging on ED acceptances more than in past?

tamenund
Wed, 19 Jan 2022 19:27:01 +0000

If by “rigged” you mean non-transparent preference, athletic recruiting is probably the least “rigged” part of selective admissions. The desired qualities are widely understood and standardized in the form of athletic results and statistics, strict rules from the NCAA on down to its component leagues govern how recruiting may happen, and the spots available to athletes are generally fixed at most institutions. It is more transparent than nearly any other aspect of admissions because there is often little doubt who the most desirable athletes are.

If you mean that colleges and universities should not seek and preferentially admit good athletes over lesser or non-athletes, that’s a legitimate philosophical position. Equally legitimate, and a reality based on generations of tradition in American undergraduate education, is that athletics and other extracurricular elements of school life are considered important in ways that they are not in American graduate and professional education. Other countries have different approaches, but generally, American higher education is a globally desired product so it must not be as bad as some in this forum often conclude.

Perhaps colleges and universities are cynically employing ED and EA programs “to paper over different rigged” processes. Or, just perhaps, we have the system for selective admissions that organically developed out of a few schools offering early admissions to improve their success recruiting their most desired candidates and then everyone who admitted applicants selectively had to follow suit to be competitive. Either or both could be true, but I tend to think it is mostly or entirely the latter.

When the number of applications per applicant ramped up steeply because the introduction of online applications such as the Common App made the marginal “pain” of each additional application low or non-existent, it established a randomizing assignment condition across each selective band. To put this another way, when multiple applications were difficult to submit, the initial filter of personal choice was more significant. That filter has now migrated to admissions offices, who today must plow through a magnitude more applications. The result is that admissions choices seem more random and capricious IF one is set on an individual school or has a strict preference hierarchy. IF, in contrast, you have a mix of different schools without being fixated on one or two, you are likely to be happy with the result.

No doubt, multiple admission points can drag out a stressful process…but this is only true for those who voluntarily participate. No one has to apply early, or apply at all, to a selective institution. If you are stressed out and view selective colleges and universities as a cabal of criminals, opt out and opt into the thousands of American four-year colleges and universities that are essentially not selective. A student able enough to succeed at an admissions-selective institution will also succeed at one that is not admissions-selective. The few studies done on this seem to vindicate this perspective.

If you opt in and are still unsettled, however, try this thought experiment: think of EA/ED as “regular admission” and RD as “late admission.” See, problem solved.